General Discussion

In this fourth installment in WarCry's "Ask a Dev" interview series; Cryptic Studios Producer Serdar Copur answers questions from the community on City of Heroes and City of Villains.

arthurh3535: What is the hardest 'programming' thing that you want to eventually add to the game?

Serdar Copur: Blue-sky questions are so much fun. The most difficult thing to develop that I would like to add to our game is a completely new database architecture which allows every single player who plays CoH & CoV to be able to play on the same game server. This means no more server selection screens, no more re-rolling because your real life friends are not on the same server as you, and no more trouble finding a group at 3:00 AM because everyone else is sleeping. It's not an impossible endeavor but my programming team assures me that there is nothing more time consuming and complicated that we could develop for our game at this point. I guess we can always dream.

Read the entire interview here.

Thanks for the good link.

Very disappointing.  No new power sets or epic ATs in Issue 10 either.  With new issues coming out only a couple of times a year or so, this just isn't looking good to me.  I doubt I'll be returning to the Co* universe. 

The game has been slowing degrading with the Devs lack of desire to provide the game with anything of lasting quality.  Issue 9 looks to re-invent CoX for all intensive purposes but I strongly have doubts about adding an economy to a game 3 years old where so many "old timers" have more cash than what can be earned today. 

The one point that scares me out of the Warcry interview though is the fact that the first statement mentioned server consolidation.  It was followed up by saying it looked to be very hard to do but it wasn't impossible.  I am wondering if word from NCSoft has been given to reduce the number of servers in the next few months which would signal the end of major support for this game.

Oh well...there is still issue 9.

The new Hamidon raid seems to be an attempt to fix the griefing problems of that encounter and to streamline it against farming for the precious enhancements.  The Statesman TF sounds good but in the end...it will become as stale as the LRSF in a month or so after daily runs.

Issue 10 - meh...I belive issues 10 is actually going to be smaller than what people are expecting with the bulk of that issue getting pushed into issue 11.

Shame...it was and still is a very cool game.  All good things but end.

yeah thats the rut these current gen MMO games are in people get bored after they hit the level cap would be nice if they get rid of all this class based nonsense and let us pick the skills we really want. would be fun to build an energy melee/regen villain/hero

Back on topic there is no new powersets on the horizon dont they care they've lost 20,000 subscriptions since Q2 report? I wish they would merge these servers are do something cause all these little updates aren't anything major

Originally posted by vajuras

yeah thats the rut these current gen MMO games are in people get bored after they hit the level cap would be nice if they get rid of all this class based nonsense and let us pick the skills we really want. would be fun to build an energy melee/regen villain/hero

Back on topic there is no new powersets on the horizon dont they care they've lost 20,000 subscriptions since Q2 report? I wish they would merge these servers are do something cause all these little updates aren't anything major

I don't think skills systems are much better.  But that is just an opinion based on 31+ years of playing RPGs.  You spend X time advancing the character either way.  Worse, skills system juggle the skills (ie you are free to respec anyway at any time) or they make the skill points signifcantly harder to get the higher you go or you cap the skills.  again, boils down to boring in the end.

But some people want it really because they want to be the UBER character.  You know, the guy who is a better tank than a class based tank and who cast spells better than a class based mage and a healer better than a class based healer.  Pretty much a 13 year olds wet dream character or for those who can't/won't accomplish anything IRL.  You end up with even more FTOM and even worse gimping.  And to that, the uber character is extra boring.

In CoX beta you could pick all your skills but before release they got greedy and went with classes. This way people will keep rerolling and making new toons. A top of that respecs are limited.

Guild Wars outsells CoX bigtime and its skill based. You can create a max level toon and just earn skills and build your own class. I think thats a lot more flexible and a strong reason why GW is #1 ranked on this site and its not even an MMO (its CORPG)

Originally posted by DTMiddle

The game has been slowing degrading with the Devs lack of desire to provide the game with anything of lasting quality.  Issue 9 looks to re-invent CoX for all intensive purposes but I strongly have doubts about adding an economy to a game 3 years old where so many "old timers" have more cash than